Posted on 05/05/2003 3:13:27 PM PDT by Tailgunner Joe
Sometimes a Jew’s worst enemy is another Jew.
On Sept. 1, 1939, Adolf Hitler invaded Poland. Senior Nazi Reinhard Heydrich soon ordered the establishment of Jewish councils to oversee the occupied Jewish population and administer Nazi policy.
The Nazis established a Jewish council, or Judenrat, in Lodz (central Poland) on Oct. 13. Appointed to head the Judenrat as Alteste der Juden (Elder of the Jews) was Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, a former businessman and orphanage director born in 1877.
By scholarly consensus, Rumkowski was tyrannical in this capacity. Seminal Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg notes that Rumkowski “became a dedicated autocrat in the ghetto”; Michael Marrus of the University of Toronto describes Rumkowski as “intensely authoritarian”; and Israel Gutman, a member of the Warsaw ghetto’s Jewish underground and later a history professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, refers to Rumkowski’s “despotic tendencies.”
In “The Drowned and the Saved,” the late Holocaust survivor and author Primo Levi gives a portrait of Rumkowski:
… he gave orders to design and print stamps bearing his effigy, with his snow-white hair and beard haloed by the light of Hope and Faith. He had a carriage drawn by a skeleton nag in which he rode through the streets of [his] miniscule kingdom, streets crowded with beggars and postulants. He had a regal manner and surrounded himself with a court of flatterers and henchmen; he had his courier-poets compose hymns in which “his firm and powerful hands” were celebrated, as well as the peace and order which thanks to him reigned in the ghetto. He ordered that the children in the nefarious schools, devastated daily by epidemics, malnutrition, and German raids, should be assigned essays in praise “of our beloved and providential president.” Like all autocrats, he hastened to organize an efficient police force, ostensibly to maintain order, but in fact to protect his own person and impose his discipline: six hundred guards armed with clubs, and an unspecified number of spies. He delivered many speeches, some of which have been preserved for us and whose style is unmistakable: he had adopted the oratorical technique of Mussolini and Hitler, the style of inspired recitation, the pseudo-colloquy with the crowd, the creation of consent through subjugation and plaudit.
Rumkowski’s peers viewed him similarly. Warsaw Judenrat chief Adam Czerniakow wrote in his diary: “The individual does not exist for him. He uses a Sonderkommando [Jewish ghetto police force] for the purpose of requisitioning. He has been collecting diamonds and furs.” (Czerniakow committed suicide on July 23, 1942, after the Nazis ordered him to deport Jews to concentration camps.)
Rumkowski also preyed upon the children of Lodz. In “Rumkowski and the Orphans of Lodz,” Lucille Eichengreen recounts being abused by the Elder of the Jews.
Rumkowski’s complicity with the Reich didn’t save him, though; the Nazis deported him to Auschwitz in August 1944. According to one account, Jews from the ghetto killed him upon his arrival.
What can be called the Rumkowski Phenomenon manifests in any subjugated group; some will collaborate with the subjugators and aggrandize themselves through this squalid relationship.
A present case of the Rumkowshi Phenomenon is in Cuba’s captive Jewish population.
Approximately 15,000 Jews lived in Cuba before Fidel Castro seized power in 1959, many of them refugees from Soviet and Nazi tyranny. Cuban Jews thus soon recognized Castro’s despotic character.
The Cuban Jewish exile Felix Reyler wrote in 1965, “When the uniformed and swaggering Castro speaks to the suffering masses of Cuba concentrated in the public square, he repeats exactly the actions of Mussolini in the Plaza of Rome and Hitler in the Plaza of Nuremberg.”
(In high school, Castro carried a copy of “Mein Kampf” and emulated Mussolini’s rhetorical style; he later owned 12 volumes of Mussolini’s writings. Consider the nexus between Castro’s slogan “Inside the Revolution, everything; outside the Revolution, nothing” and Mussolini’s “Everything within the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.”)
Cuban Jews weren’t exempt from Castro’s massive “nationalization” (i.e., theft) of property. A representative of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society observed after visiting Cuba in 1961:
All assets [have been taken over] by the government, the militia, or other bandits who have simply taken over everything which our brothers have left behind after having worked for many years, sacrificing themselves to make their way. … Those who remain can do nothing; business is dying for lack of merchandise, and the large industries, as well as the small ones, are being nationalized. Owners are being watched strictly.
Neither were they exempt from the associated totalitarianism:
It was not only a question of having spoken to persons of middle class bourgeois origin who had been expropriated and regretted the loss of their holdings. I spoke to persons who were in no way affected by the regime. … What these people are distressed by (to use a mild word) is the constant terror, the uncertainty, the informing (or as they use the Hebrew word – m’seerah [literally, passing on]) that goes on. In each city block and large apartment house there exist units of a “Committee for the Defense of the Revolution” who watch people as they come and go, and who, if they don’t like particularly the color of your hair or the way you conduct yourself, have the right to arrest you. You are subject to arrest under any suspicion and can be informed on by a personal enemy.
In addition to the systematic violation of their human rights, Cuban Jews have endured a regime that since the 1960s has armed and trained Israel’s enemies; equated Zionism with racism; accused Israel of genocide; and referred this year to “Jewish money seek[ing] to expand its global reach.”
Less than 10 percent of the Cuban Jewish community remains, an unsurprising tragedy given this chronic anti-Semitism. Jews (or any other group) tend to dislike living in a country that subjugates and stigmatizes them.
In February 1978, Cuban Jewish exile Bernardo Benes began a series of meetings with Castro. During one of the meetings he asked Castro to authorize the emigration of Cuban Jews.
Castro agreed, according to Benes, and his decision was relayed to the “leader” of the Cuban Jewish community, Jose Miller.
Cuban Jews didn’t receive the message.
It was a representative injustice by Miller. This man has manipulated and abused Cuban Jews for a quarter of a century.
A retired officer in Castro’s military, Miller has supported him since 1959 – “an agent of Castro’s regime,” remarks Cuban Jew Jose Cohen, a former cryptographer who fled the regime in 1994. (Castro refuses to let Cohen’s wife and three children reunite with him. This is the same Castro who talked about family reunification when he demanded the return of Elian Gonzalez.)
In his monograph “Judaism in Cuba: 1959-1999,” Cuban Jewish exile and scholar Moises Asis refers to Miller as “an unscrupulous anti-Zionist, anti-religious Jew.” He notes that Miller has compared Israel to apartheid South Africa (a common propaganda tactic of the regime) and writes:
Widely regarded as a very corrupt, nepotistic, and authoritarian person, he has served as the internal police of the Jewish community and the external lobbyist for Castro in exchange for impunity for his actions. In addition to his personal appropriation of cash and resources donated by foreign Jewish communities, Miller facilitated the aliyah (immigration) to Israel mainly for those who would constitute a burden on the state of Israel.
Regarding Miller’s theft of humanitarian aid, a Jew in Cuba notes how these goods “disappear as if they [Miller and his second-in-command, Adela Dworin] were magicians.” Cuban Jew Tony Fune calls Miller a “despot.”
No wonder Cuba lacks a permanent rabbi: Despots dread competition.
Like Cubans in general, Cuban Jews can’t leave the country. Miller’s foreign travel, however, includes Austria, Argentina, Israel and the United States (numerous visits in the case of the U.S.). His children also live outside Cuba.
With complicity comes privilege.
After Cuba’s emancipation from Castro, it is important that those who perpetuated his brutality do not escape justice. Jose Miller is one of these people.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.